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Remembrance Day especially poignant for children of fallen soldiers

Three young women whose fathers died in service describe childhoods marked by loss, and a burden that few Canadians of their generation have had to bear.

Jasmine Vialette, 20, now studies aquaculture at Dalhousie University in Truro, N.S. She receives assistance from Canada Company, a charity that offers scholarships for people who have lost a parent in the military. It also provides much-needed peer support, she says. (Tim Krochak for the Toronto Star)

Died: July 21, 1997, Bosnia, in camp while on a NATO-led peace force, age 33

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Remembrance Day has always been difficult for Jasmine Vialette.

Her father died when she was 2, and while she has no memories of him, the 20-year-old says her life has been “shaped around his loss.”

When Jasmine was younger, her mother, Amber Vialette-Douglas, would go to her school every Nov. 11 to check on her.

“It’s difficult,” she says. “My mom was really strong for me.”

Cpl. Robert Daniel Vialette with his daughter, Jasmine, then 18 months old, at Canadian Forces Base Shilo in Manitoba. Vialette died in Bosnia while serving on a NATO-led peace force in 1997.

They still spend every Remembrance Day together — the last two in Halifax, near where Jasmine is studying.

“Last year, around Remembrance Day, I was having a really hard time,” recalls Jasmine. “Sometimes it just comes back and it really hurts for no real reason.”

After her father’s death, her mother moved the family from Shilo, Man., where there is a Canadian Forces base, to Winnipeg so she could go back to school. Amber is now a social worker with Manitoba Family Services. She remarried when Jasmine was 6 and has an 8-year-old daughter, Sherris.

Jasmine will be spending this Remembrance Day with her mom in Winnipeg.

She says she can’t remember how she found out her father died — it was as though she always knew. After his death, she never learned much more about him because she had limited contact with his family.

One of the hardest days for her was graduating high school, because her father wasn’t there.

“Just thinking into the future — getting married, having kids — he won’t be there,” she says. “It’s really heartbreaking.”

Amber Vialette-Douglas with her daughter, Jasmine, at a Remembrance Day service in Halifax last year. Amber is wearing the Memorial Cross, awarded to three family members of a Canadian soldier who died on active duty. Jasmine is wearing the Memorial Ribbon, a symbol of personal loss and sacrifice.

Jasmine is studying aquaculture at Dalhousie University in Truro, N.S. She gets assistance from the charitable organization Canada Company, which, among other things, provides post-secondary scholarships for kids who have lost a parent in the military. Its annual scholarship ceremony, she says, provides some badly needed peer support.

It’s been so meaningful that she got a tattoo of a lightning bolt on her ankle to symbolize her friendships with other recipients.

“When I grew up, I didn’t know a single person that had lost a parent,” Jasmine says. “Canada Company gave me a huge support system. There are probably about 15 kids that I know who have lost parents. That’s the biggest way to cope.”

Capt. Kevin Lee Naismith

Born: Nov. 7, 1964, North York

Died: May 26, 2003, Cold Lake, Alta., ejecting from a CF-18 fighter jet during a military training exercise, age 38

Halsey Naismith, shown at the 15 Wing Air Force base in Moose Jaw, Sask. Halsey was 6 when her father, Capt. Kevin Lee Naismith, died in a training exercise. Halsey, now 19, studies business at Saskatchewan Polytechnic. (Matthew Smith for the Toronto Star)

Halsey Naismith remembers her father dotting her nose with shaving cream when she was up early enough to catch him before he went to work.

When he left their house in Cold Lake, Alta., to go on training missions, she would wave out the window until he turned the corner and she couldn’t see him anymore. He brought her presents every time he came home.

But that all ended when she was 6. Investigators believe his plane experienced a flight control failure that caused it to barrel-roll, like “a corkscrew,” says Belinda Naismith, Halsey’s mother. “He had to eject. And his safety equipment killed him.”

Kevin Lee Naismith died when a harness strap, pulled taut as his parachute opened, hit him in the neck, according to news reports.

Too young to understand that her father had died, Halsey, now 19, says it was three years before she cried.

“You’re so little that Dad goes away for work all the time. And then you think that he’s going to come back.”

The pilot’s death was major news, the first fatality during an ejection in the CF-18 model’s 21 years of service. An investigation into the cause was inconclusive, but the Canadian military made upgrades to the harness and the ejection seat.

Kevin Lee Naismith celebrates Christmas with his children, Arina, Adam and Halsey, and wife Belinda. After Kevin's death, Belinda helped found a group for grieving spouses and parents.

Today, the Naismith children — Adam, 25, Arina, 21, and Halsey — all take comfort in the fact that their father’s death helped save the lives of the handful of pilots who have ejected from the jet since then.

“At least he passed doing something he loved to do,” adds Arina, who lives in Saskatoon, where she is raising her 3-year-old son, Noah, while studying chemistry at university.

Halsey has moved out of her mother’s house and lives with her boyfriend, Josey Wale. She’s taking business classes at Saskatchewan Polytechnic in Moose Jaw.

Adam has two degrees and is a substitute teacher who works a second job at Home Depot. Like Arina, he lives in Saskatoon.

His goal is to become a school guidance counsellor, following in the footsteps of the “phenomenal” role models who helped his sisters and him cope after their father’s death.

Belinda says that in the years after Kevin died, she worried about the lingering effects that losing a parent can have on kids.

She helped found a group for grieving spouses and parents that is now part of the Operational Stress Injury Social Support program offered by Veterans Affairs Canada and the Department of National Defence. But she says there is a finite amount of counselling provided by the government for children, and no peer support.

“With these kids, not only do they lose their dads, but in most cases they lose where they live, they lose their school and they lose their friends because you move.”

The military pays for survivors to relocate from the base, or the town nearby, within a two-year period, a benefit that is also offered to retiring servicemen and women. The family moved to Moose Jaw, where Belinda had met Kevin.

She says her children are “doing all right. I worked pretty hard to make sure that they would be OK.”

Adam was troubled by grief but says he has come to terms with it.

Capt. Kevin Lee Naismith with daughters Halsey and Arina. Naismith was killed while ejecting from a CF-18 fighter jet during a training exercise in Alberta in 2003.

“Learning that what you’re feeling is OK to feel is the most important part,” he says, explaining that his sadness once gave him a sense of inadequacy. “I felt like I had to put on a tough face because I was the oldest. I was the boy. So I had those feelings as well. I actually struggled with that kind of stuff for a long time.”

Adam says a religious studies course about death and dying that he took five years ago in university finally put a lot of the demons to rest. “Some of the readings we had to do were really helpful and cathartic.”

Adam was 12 when the accident happened and remembers the day unfolding like a scene from a movie.

The family went to watch the Maple Flag mission, as they did every year, the kids skipping school and everyone sitting on picnic tables in an observation area where they could watch the planes, in the hundreds, take off from a nearby runway.

The annual exercise prepares Canada’s military to deploy fighter jets quickly in co-ordination with other countries.

The family was there all afternoon and watched as one of the Canadian formations returned short a plane, a not uncommon sight because solo planes sometimes came back to refuel.

The kids were at the grocery store with Belinda when she received a call and was told to return home.

“There were three people standing on the porch,” she recalls. “One was a padre. You know that’s never something you want to see.”

Adam plans to marry his fiancée, Kailin Mayes, whom he proposed to last month in Las Vegas, in 2017.

He says that not having his father at the wedding will be sad but, in an odd way, normal. “I still feel sad sometimes. But I know he wouldn’t want me to be sad. Not for that. I try to celebrate those moments instead.”

Sgt. Hedley Jerry Squires

Born: March 4, 1965, Buchans, N.L.

Died: Aug. 25, 1999, Thasos Island, Greece, after the moped he was riding was hit by a truck, age 34

Lynn Squires has high praise for the sacrifices her mother made after the death of her husband, Sgt. Hedley Squires, in 1999.

Lynn Squires, 24, shown in Edmonton's Beechmount Cemetery. The University of Alberta medical student says her mother's sacrifices helped her and her sister deal with the loss of their dad. (Jason Franson for the Toronto Star)

“My sister and I have done so well and had so many opportunities to succeed and be happy because of everything my mom has done for us,” says Lynn of her 51-year-old mother, Patricia.

Lynn, 24, is in medical school at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. Working three jobs, and with financial help from her mother, she managed to get an undergraduate degree in science without taking out a loan.

Her sister, Laura, who is 20, will graduate from Edmonton’s MacEwan University with an accounting degree next June and already has a job lined up at KPMG. She plays on a soccer team and is working at two part-time jobs.

The girls had the support of an uncle in Edmonton, who cheered them on at all of their competitive sporting events — gymnastics, soccer and swimming — and even now comes to watch them play ball hockey and soccer.

Both women receive financial support for their education from Veterans Affairs as well as the charitable organization Canada Company.

Lynn was 8 when her father died. He was on a three-day leave, in an area that was still considered an active duty zone, during a rotation in Kosovo.

Sgt. Hedley Jerry Squires with his wife, Patricia, and daughters Laura, left, and Lynn on July 1, 1999 — the last day they saw him. He died in an accident while on leave during a mission in Kosovo in 1999.

Patricia, then 35, quit her job as a computer programmer to raise her kids. “She never remarried,” says Lynn. “She decided to look after us and didn’t really start thinking about that.”

They moved from the family home in Edmonton so that Patricia could escape some of the memories.

Lynn remembers her father as a fun, happy person who “always made sure to be involved in our lives as much as possible when he was home.” The year he died, Lynn and her father went on a ski trip to the mountains.

He could be gone for long periods — to Kosovo, to Croatia on a peacekeeping mission, to New Zealand for a military exchange or to the Canadian Forces base in Wainwright, Alta., for training.

Laura was only 4 when her father died and his death was hard for her to grasp.

The family recently learned from a psychologist that it’s quite common for young children to grieve later — a situation that presented Laura with challenges through high school and at the beginning of university.

Lynn Squires, left, with her mother, Patricia, and sister, Laura, at their Edmonton home. For Lynn, the hardest moments are marking milestones — such as graduation ceremonies — without her dad.

For Lynn, the hard times come at big events — graduation from high school and university, her sister’s graduation. “I know it’s really hard on my mom, those events, too,” she says, “because she feels like he should have been there.”

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